The Great Gatsby

The Classic American Novel — Complete Edition with Critical Afterword and Author Biography

Set in the summer of 1922 on Long Island's North Shore, The Great Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby — a self-made millionaire who throws lavish parties in the hope of reuniting with Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved and lost five years before. Narrated by his neighbor Nick Carraway, the novel follows Gatsby's obsessive pursuit of an impossible past through a world of jazz-age excess, bootleg fortunes, and careless wealth.

What begins as a tale of longing becomes something darker: a reckoning with the distance between who we are and who we believe ourselves to be. Gatsby's dream is magnificent and doomed. Daisy's voice is full of money. Tom Buchanan smashes things and retreats. And Nick watches it all, unable to look away.

Published in 1925 to modest sales, The Great Gatsby is now recognized as one of the defining works of American literature — a novel about desire, class, reinvention, and the impossible promise at the heart of the American experience. Its final sentence is among the most celebrated in the English language.

This edition includes a critical afterword exploring the novel's symbolic architecture and an author biography tracing Fitzgerald's trajectory from literary celebrity to obscurity and posthumous rediscovery.